THE BACK STORY: Don’t believe fear-mongering about microwaves

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/10/2019 (2357 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have a microwave I absolutely love.

It’s a Quasar, made by Panasonic.

I know it inside out. I know exactly how its cooks whatever I want. I know its variables, its quirks, its consistencies.

It’s dependable. It’s never let me down.

And it’s more than 33 years old.

We got a “new” microwave about 10 years ago, because I was sure Old Faithful was going to conk out any day. But it hasn’t. (What I’ve learned from the “new” purchase is that I can’t ever live without two microwaves!)

The back story about the Quasar is that it was a wedding gift from my in-laws. Our families were exceedingly generous when my husband Ken and I got married — my folks gave us our fridge and stove and washer and dryer, and my brother’s gift was our dishwasher. And I need to note that my father, Ivan, was a manufacturer’s agent (you might better know the term for his career as travelling salesman), meaning he sold the wares of certain companies mostly to furniture, appliance and department stores back in the day. And the reason this is important is that because of his job, he managed to get all of our gifted appliances, including the microwave, at wholesale cost, which saved everybody, my in-laws included, a ton of money.

But while the fridge, stove, washer, dryer and dishwasher have been replaced multiple times since our marriage in 1986, that old Quasar has kept chugging along. I used it to extremes, too, since as a crafter and before I graduated to a real kiln, I used to fuse (melt together) glass in a tiny kiln made, believe it or not, for the microwave. I made thousands of dollars worth of earrings, necklaces and brooches in that wonderful little kiln in the old microwave. And while most of the heat was kept in the kiln, it had to vent, and in order to fuse the glass, the temperature in the kiln was between 1,300 and 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit!

There were a few times when I was in frenzied creation mode that the old microwave overheated, and blinked off. The light went out and it just shut down. Each time — and that probably happened six or eight times — I thought, ‘OK, this is it. I’ve finally wrecked it. It’s done.’

But an hour or two later, much to my relief, Old Faithful would blink back on. And I continued to use it to heat and cook food those same days, and for years and decades to come.

But here’s why I’m talking about this now. I have a dear friend who was a nurse (she has lived in Ontario for the past 25 years or so) and I just saw her last week for the first time in four years. And our visit reminded me of a conversation we had in my kitchen before she moved away.

“Pregnant women aren’t supposed to stand close to microwaves, you know,” she admonished me as I was heating something for lunch.

I looked at her darkly. I wasn’t pregnant — in fact, I’d had a hysterectomy a few years prior to this particular chat. But the point she was making was that in her opinion, despite my being without child, I was standing too close to my microwave. They were unsafe, she seemed to suggest, and radiation leakage could be harmful to anyone.

So the day after our most recent get-together, I went online to do some research. Truth be told, I’d wondered occasionally over the years if I might be doing myself some harm by keeping such an outdated appliance in my kitchen. But study after study said that radiation leakage was exceedingly minute, and according to a 2007 New York Times article, “Proximity to a microwave oven is not dangerous.”

Much more recent research stated precisely the same thing. According to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, “old or faulty door seals are the most common causes of microwave radiation leakage.” But my old Quasar seals up tighter than a drum. You should hear that door when it closes! It’s like the clang of a prison gate slamming shut behind you. (We won’t go into how I know this — suffice it to say I’ve never spent any time in jail or prison.)

The conclusion of an extensive study from interestingengineering.com said this: “So should you be concerned if your microwave oven leaks radiation? Well, no. You are more likely to hurt yourself from a heated glass of water than the radiation itself. The radiation will not be in a high enough dose to cause you any harm.”

And while I believe all that, I thought I’d feel even better if I could talk to a real person — somebody who’s an expert in his field. Somebody I’d known and dealt with for years.

So I called Richard Kullberg of Kullberg’s Home Furnishings. He listened while I quizzed him about whether I should worry about my old Quasar leaking radiation.

There was a moment of silence when I was done. Then he said, “I’ve never come up against that question in all the years I’ve been doing this.” When I asked how long that was, he said, “Fifty-six years.”

And that, in addition to all I’d read, was enough for me.

Bottom line? I’m going to hang on to my old Quasar until it gives up the ghost. But I don’t believe it ever will. And if anybody tries to take it away from me, they’re going to have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. Because when something is that reliable and lasts that long, you know it has to be special. And in my books, that means it’s definitely worth keeping.